Reflection - Loraine James (2021)

Ideated from: A playlist I uncovered from couple years ago entitled “Weird Shit from albumoftheyear.org scraping”. I do love to go deep-diving into genres and lists of stuff I’ve never heard of on there.

It’s not super radical to build hip hop tracks with dancefloor-friendly electronics. But it is hard to make it sound both like natural hip hop and natural dance music. And it’s even more rare to find someone who can knock the back wall out of that and move into fuzzy, hazy IDM with almost an ambient feel to it even when it gets frenetic.

James seems to have mastered several divergent styles of the London music scene and blended them all so evenly it’s impossible to pin into a single genre.

Tracks I Liked

Let’s Go - a crazy intro turns into a huge dancefloor track

Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery - great title, funky jam

Running Like That - smooth and forceful at the same time